Eating Disorder Talk

Eating Disorder Talk is my foray into communicating both the marketing and scenarios of eating disorders; it’s also the opportunity to share my own story in the hopes that someone out there thinks, “I’m not alone.” So in that effort, here begins the first part of my epic - how I came to have 20 years of experience coping with, fighting against and living for eating disorders.

I was raised as an only child in a single parent family. What’s a little different about this is that during the early 80s it was virtually unheard of in Greater Vancouver for a father to be the single parent. My dad was a multitude of things, the foremost being a disciplinarian. He learned a lot of life lessons at early ages and was constantly caught between wanting to stop me from making his mistakes and letting me learn from my own. He was my first best friend, exalted and feared. If he had been a different person, I surely would have been as well, but thankfully, I am not ashamed of the person I have become, in spite of and in owing to him.

In my early primary years, I went for a general check-up at my family doctor. The afterword my dad and doctor shared was behind closed doors, but for some reason, I heard the one sentence that would become my defining mantra for the next two decades, “she’s a little overweight.” I had already gained the awareness of how cruel children on the playground can be - had been called such pet names as butterball and fatso - so this was not news to me, it was proof.

So began the then-subtle relationship with food and my own image in the mirror. I began systematically borrowing books and magazines from the library in relation to dieting and eating disorders. Until I had read everything that they had to offer. I ravaged these articles and texts - pouring through multiple authors in a day. I took notes and tips down in my many journals and notebooks.

I was a bipolar writer even at that point. I started numerous times, writing my own novels - I would be a published writer by ten, I assumed - and all of these beginnings had the common theme of a tween going through the motions of anorexia. There were likely about four or five attempts, where I’d hunch over a notebook for hours, pouring out 40 or more hand printed pages. I’d only re-read them after the well had gone dry or some other interruption had come up, then I’d decide that it was all wrong and never touch it again. It wasn’t good enough, so I had to give up trying.

I became a made-for-tv movie junkie and it wasn’t until the sixth one that my father noticed the trend they shared - teenager goes on diet and becomes obsessed, is diagnosed, her caring family rallies to her rescue and then the final moments of the film show her life back on track, at a respectable weight and doing normal teenager things. In hindsight, these movies gave me a goal: to get to the point where my family would save me after I had become impossibly ill. Then I could lead a normal life populated with loving parents, friends and social activities, in a body still thin enough for tv. Reality would set in later.

It began with research and I’m still researching.